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CD-RW going out the 3rd story window

Ok, I've had so many damn troubles with this burner of mine. There are so many problems with my pc when I have it hooked up and using it. Where do i start...

First, the performance drops. I mean, I cant do ANYTHING hardly when its burning. This is unacceptable. My rig is fast, damn fast, and a measly burner should not slow it down so bad that text on the screen cant keep up with my typing. Granted, I can type 80+wpm, but this is rediculous. EVERYTHING slows down when burning. RAM is still at 830+MB free, but the CPU usage jumps from 83% to 100% consistently. The computer is just so damn slow, period.

2nd, it completely messes up games with it installed. Yeah, Command and Conquer mostly. I don't understand this at all. It kills network performance and makes the game skip really bad. This one is beyond me, and frankly I'm tired of it.

3rd, it NEVER EVER, and I mean NEVER burns at 48x. Its ALWAYS 24x. What the hell? I bought a 48x, not pay all the money for this and have it operate at half the speed. Unacceptable again.

I'm about ready to literally rip this piece of crap out of my case and throw it on the ground outside. Then proceed to run it over with the car a few times and bash the remains with a 20-lb sledge.

Does ANYONE know something I can try to save this burner or if its the burner for sure before I spend the money on another worthless piece of trash?

It's possessed, I swear. It just trashed another disc, and I've had it with the thing. Before I proceed to make any more knuckles bleed from fits of rage (dont worry, would NEVER hit my precious PC) I'm going to YANK it out tomorrow and beat it to death with some power tools. Maybe place it in a vice grip and continue to tighten until it explodes.

I'm open to suggestions before I buy a new one. I bought this at RadioShack(my college job, so I bought it from work), and its the 3rd one. I think the brand is I/O Magic. I'm NOT going to exchange it for another one, 3 of them is enough already. Plus it's been a few months, and dont want to go through any hassles getting my money back. I'll have to eat this one.

How do I check and make sure that it's on DMA instead of PIO? I can't remember offhand.

I'm open to any suggestions guys and I have a cooler head about it today, thanks!

I did a search on i/o magic burners and I noticed a recurring word... crap. Maybe they just don't make a good product, you did say this was your third. I would try to return it and go for a different brand like, plextor, lg, liteon and so on.

That burner is crap. You'd think with that nice machine you have there you could atleast afford a decent burner. Why put a rotten cherry on top of a tasty ice cream cone? Just sell the damn thing and buy a better brand.

I'm not going to be buying any more crap burners. I got this one from work since it was on clearance. Although, I should have learned my lesson the first time I had to take it back mere weeks after. Ah well, live and learn. No more crap hardware in my machines, simple as that I guess.

Plextor are possibly the best brand out there. That price tag certainly isn't just for show.

I've had 2 Lite-On drives, and my dad has one. I used Lite-On in all my builds, and simply wouldn't use anything else. Great price... great performance. No problems when burning, even with cheap media. I burnt 702mb of data @ 52x onto a cheap 40x 700mb CD-R, and it came out fine.

On another note, I had a Philips OEM drive which would occasionally crash the machine it was connected to. The drive would freeze completely (tray wouldn't open) and you would have to restart or even turn off the machine to get it to work again. I never tried a firmware update before it died an untimely death